But whether this new admissions record will be reflected in a generally more educated populace is a moot point.
Students from the University of Wolverhampton heard speaking on the radio a few months ago suggest not. They sounded more like they’d walked off a building site than out of a university library. Even the writing of Cambridge English undergraduates is devoid of syntax and grammar, according to one don who spoke to me a couple of years ago.
So are our graduates any better ‘educated' than their forebears who left school at 14 a hundred years ago? Finding my gran’s school leaving exam report the other month made me wonder. I was re-shelving some of my late father’s classic and theology books when a sheet of yellowed and crumbling paper fell to the ground. It was his mother’s school leaving certificate. A humble confectioner’s daughter born in 1874, she had been educated, for free, at Sheffield Central School. This plain grey-haired old lady I remember, with her sweet hammer smashing rock for us, had left school at 14 back in 1888, but, I learnt to my surprise, with a clutch of top school leaving passes in French, English, History, Maths, Bible Studies and Latin. It made me think.
Who was the better educated I pondered? My gran or the Wolverhampton students, whose command of English was conspicuous by its absence and who had even less Latin.
Students from the University of Wolverhampton heard speaking on the radio a few months ago suggest not. They sounded more like they’d walked off a building site than out of a university library. Even the writing of Cambridge English undergraduates is devoid of syntax and grammar, according to one don who spoke to me a couple of years ago.
So are our graduates any better ‘educated' than their forebears who left school at 14 a hundred years ago? Finding my gran’s school leaving exam report the other month made me wonder. I was re-shelving some of my late father’s classic and theology books when a sheet of yellowed and crumbling paper fell to the ground. It was his mother’s school leaving certificate. A humble confectioner’s daughter born in 1874, she had been educated, for free, at Sheffield Central School. This plain grey-haired old lady I remember, with her sweet hammer smashing rock for us, had left school at 14 back in 1888, but, I learnt to my surprise, with a clutch of top school leaving passes in French, English, History, Maths, Bible Studies and Latin. It made me think.
Who was the better educated I pondered? My gran or the Wolverhampton students, whose command of English was conspicuous by its absence and who had even less Latin.